The number of people choosing to get around the capital on the public bikes system increased significantly, as passenger journeys jumped to over 3m in 2014.

Passenger journeys peaked at 355,155 in October of last year, almost 200,000 more than the number of users from the same month in the year prior. Public transport services all around the country - bus, rail and Luas - saw an increase in passenger numbers throughout the year.

Almost 38m passenger journeys were made on Irish Rail, an increase of 2.9pc on 2013.

The Luas carried 32.6m passengers, an increase of almost 7pc on the year before.

While 197.4m passengers used scheduled bus services all around the country in 2014, an increase of 2.2pc on 2013.

Maritime transport was also popular, as more than 2.8m passengers arrived and departed through Ireland on ferries last year, a slight increase of 0.3pc on the year prior.

Dublin to Holyhead was the busiest route as it accounted for almost 60pc of the total passenger numbers on scheduled ferry services travelling to and from Ireland.

Ports were also busy and 47.5m tonnes of goods were handled in Ireland.

Of this, 29.1m tonnes were unloaded here and 18.4m tonnes were loaded.

Dublin Port was the busiest facility, as almost 45pc of these goods were handled throught the port.

Last year was another runaway success for Irish airports, which handled 26.5m passengers throughout 2014.

This represented an increase of 6.9pc on the year prior.

At least 80pc of these passengers came through Dublin Airport alone.

The Dublin to Heathrow route continued to be the busiest, carrying more than 1.65m passengers.

The number of passenger journeys made through Irish airports during the summer months of June, July and August was 6pc higher than the same period from the year before.

Shannon and Cork were the second and third busiest airports, while London's Gatwick and Stansted completed the top three busiest routes to and from the country.

New private cars which were licensed for the first time were up almost 30pc in 2014 to 92,361 while the number of small public service vehicles-taxis and hackneys decreased. The number of taxis on the road last year dropped by 1.4pc to 17,788. Hackneys decreased by 8.9pc to 2,322.

This data was released yesterday by the Central Statistics Office as part of their 'Transport Omnibus for 2014' report.

It also detailed that last year, Irish-licenced vehicles travelled a total of 42.4bn km.

Three-quarters of that journey length was attributed to private cars, which accounted for 77.3pc of the total number of licensed vehicles.

And car owners from Co Roscommon were found to have travelled further than the national average, according to the report.

The CSO also released details about the number of penalty points issued in 2014.

A total of 233,130 penalty point endorsement notices were issued, representing an increase of 10.8pc on the previous year.

And more than three-quarters of these, 77.1pc, were related to speeding.